Comparison and joy: a complicated relationship
Comparison from a place of enough-ness
It’s starting to rain outside, but it’s perfect weather to stay in, bake banana bread, and publish my newsletter. This past week, it seems like sickness has plagued half my team in various ways, whether it’s themselves, their kids, or childcare) — a gentle reminder to take care of yourselves when sick, especially if you’re working remotely and hesitant to take time off for recovery.
Some thoughts I’ve had lately about comparison, context, and joy.
—
I grew up in an interesting comparison void. Unlike many other Chinese parents, mine didn’t have big social communities through church or Chinese school, so I was thankfully spared the comparisons to my peers through those vectors. My high school also didn’t have rankings or a valedictorian. And with my brother, who was two years older, I don’t really remember comparing myself to or trying to be better than him (though I pretty much always lost in Magic and Risk). I just always wanted to do whatever he was doing - which meant I was riding a two-wheeler at 4 years old and started taking piano lessons at 5. In recent years, I’ve learned that this comparison void was an intentional strategy on my mom’s part.
It quickly became clear that I would surpass my brother in piano ability, so she privately asked each of our teachers over the years to give us completely separate assignments. In doing so, we avoided any comparisons of “You’re playing that piece? I played that already!” Which you can imagine would be particularly challenging coming from your little sister.
It wasn’t until I visited him in med school, and he introduced me to his friends with “this is my sister Jean, she got the way better end of the gene pool” that I realized that although I grew up in a relatively comparison-free state, the same might not have been true for him.
I’ve heard the saying “Comparison is the thief of joy,” and I can see that it would be tiring to compare yourself to those around you all the time….especially working in tech, and especially in this age of social media, when you’re not just comparing yourself to the Jones’ next door, but also everyone you ever remotely crossed paths with.
Comparison from a place of scarcity can aggravate your sense of what-ifs and looking at the paths you didn’t take. I’ve heard that people browse LinkedIn looking at what past classmates and colleagues have achieved, which inevitably stokes thoughts of “wow he’s a doctor now?” Or “huh we started off as interns at the same time, and now they’re a C-level executive?” Which then leads to thoughts of “that should’ve been me,” or “I should be further along.”
I understand all that, but coming from a relatively non-comparative place, I’ve found in recent years found that comparison can also be clarifying and helpful in unexpected ways.
Comparison as a clarifier of strengths
My partner Naveed is a very comparative person, and through him, I’ve gotten a glimpse of a perspective that doesn’t come very naturally to me.
A few years ago, we attended a ultimate frisbee hat tournament (where you get randomly assigned to a team to play for the day). I had a great and uninhibited time, and the weather conditions and team played well to my strengths — I spent the day being a real threat to whoever we were playing against, getting open, hucking it deep to receivers, and cutting deep (and being defended by two people whenever I did). A few people on my team tried to recruit me for their club teams.
On the drive home, Naveed casually mentioned, “you were probably in the top 5 people there.” I was shocked by this statement, given that it was a co-ed tournament with over 100 people, and asked him to elaborate. He listed a few people that we had played against that he thought were the top 1, 2, and 3, and then asked me if I thought anyone else was better than me. I…had never even thought to ask myself that question.
Although constant comparison is probably exhausting, comparisons like this really opened my eyes. As someone who has played on and off for the past two decades, since high school, I’ve never really taken ultimate frisbee seriously enough to try out for the most elite teams. Having had kids in my 20s, and getting back into the sport in a casual way, I had always thought that ship had sailed. His comparative observation and subsequent experience made me realize that it was in my reach if that’s what I wanted to spend my time training for (spoiler: it was not).
Comparison can be helpful when it provides context that can help me identify possibilities, and sometimes those paths actually lead me to more joy. For example, here are just a few comparisons that I’ve become more aware of in the last few years that have helped open up possibilities for me.
This is deeply uncomfortable, but here’s to stepping into my comparative strengths.
I’m a better writer than most engineering leaders and undaunted by publishing online. This is a unique strength that I can lean into for whatever I do in my career. When I think about this and about writing a Hallway Track book, it makes sense to me that I would write it and put something like that into the world, rather than wonder if someone more qualified would do a better job.
I can do new things faster than most people. This looks like diving into new problems, quickly orienting myself in the space, soaking in enough information to get started, and doing a quick-and-dirty good-enough job. For example, I converted Lead Time Chats from a video series to a podcast in two days (choosing intro music, recording an intro, figuring out how to edit and publish the podcast, and creating blog posts with extracted quotes and respective audiograms for each episode). This comparative insight clarified for me why I’m always drawn back into and thrive at small, early-stage startups, where the role constantly changes every few months.
Comparison can be clarifying in highlighting and putting into context one’s unique strengths, rather than focus solely on weaknesses and creating a constant feeling of being deficient in some way.
Comparison as personal growth input
I once was asked to do a 9-box exercise — it’s a very corporate exercise where you put everyone in one of 9 boxes, and which box they’re in informs how you might support them or manage them. The top right is “high performance, high potential” — these are your company’s Stars.
When I told one of the “star” engineers on the team that they were doing great, and we felt like they had particularly high potential, our 1:1 suddenly deflated. Their affect shifted, and later when I reflected on our interaction, I wondered if they had interpreted “high potential” in the way that you might when a teacher says, “Well little Bobby is not very focused and a distraction to the other kids in class, but you know, I think he has a lot of potential.”
I followed up and confirmed that this was indeed the case, that they had interpreted it not as “you’re doing great, and we want to support and invest in you however we can!” But as “you have so much potential that you’re not meeting.” Classic manager learning moment.
Comparison in the form of “here is a typical expected learning curve of a new grade, here’s roughly where you are and how you are exceeding it” can help put someone’s feedback in context in a way that listing strengths and weaknesses cannot (because high-achievers will often skip the strengths and go straight to the weaknesses).
When high-achieving people have always been surrounded by high-achieving people, the feedback loop of “how am I doing?” and “what do I need to work on?” is a little off. As someone whose resume is a list of “good schools” and “good companies,” I know this all too well. The first time I left this bubble was when I started interviewing engineers at a startup. I was shocked to discover how many engineers who had years of technical experience on their resumes had trouble coding up a solution to fizzbuzz.
Comparison can also feed into personal growth by helping you know when growth is perhaps something you can aside for a bit. Personal growth that people opt into from a place of being enough is very different from personal growth that comes from a place of deficiency, of not meeting expectations. We live in a very growth-obsessed society, although thankfully a little less so in recent years with the pandemic (a silver lining, perhaps). Sometimes it feels like everyone’s waking up at 6am to establish new goals and habits, pushing their growth edge, and striving to be the best versions of ourselves.
Comparison that provides context can help you look around and say, you know what, I’m good. I’m going to lean into what I do really well, instead of feeling like I need to spend my extra hours on additional training or learning a new programming language.
Perhaps the best versions of ourselves are the ones that are also ok with letting go of striving to be better all the time.
Comparison from a place of scarcity and deficit can create suffering, but comparison from a place of enough-ness can also facilitate joy.
Raising the next generation
I struggle to navigate how to handle comparison and context with my own kids. My younger one spent the first 1.5 years of the pandemic in an distance learning pod with his older sister and their classmate. As a 5 year-old not even in kindergarten, he was adding and carrying multi-digit numbers, trying to keep up with the big kids. “I’m stupid,” he’d say, even though he was doing stuff far beyond his age level’s expectations (it’s now 3 years later, and I don’t think it’s been covered in the school curriculum).
General best practice I’ve heard is to not compare children to others, but to help then foster a sense of pride in their own progress. But I can’t help but want to do that and shout some version, “Are you kidding me? You’re not stupid! You’re way ahead!”
For any parents who have figured this, I’d love to hear how you handle this.
—
What are some of your comparative strengths that you haven’t fully owned?
What are the things that you wonder, why doesn’t everyone else do this too?
How might leaning into those more fully bring you more joy and ease?
—
Things I’ve been enjoying
My new KitchenAid mixer - please send me all your favorite recipes and things to do with a stand mixer!
Gardening - after half a year of just trying to keep existing plants alive in the new house & garden, I feel a bit more ambitious about trying to plant some things in the raised garden beds. Weeding continues to bring me joy as a thankless and tedious task that gets me outside and in my body.
My kids - They seem to be at a very magical and fun age range together where are out of the tantrum-throwing toddler ages, but they still want to do stuff with me before they reach the pre-teen stage. Also, improved reading ability means we can play more complicated games. Recently: Settlers of Catan, Carcassone, Code Names, Evolution: The Beginning, and yes, Magic the Gathering.
A Newsletter Announcement
I’ve just turned on paid subscriptions. In my head, I had a list of things to do before I could turn on paid subscriptions — upping my publishing frequency to have separate streams of public and paywalled posts, re-branding to The Hallway Track, etc. But today, I just decided to turn it on, because why not.
If you feel inclined to support my writing and publishing by buying me a Bay-Area-priced coffee a month, thank you so much ☕️